Marshall Nirenberg, a Nobel Prize-winning National Institutes of Health geneticist who deciphered the genetic code in 1961, died Jan. 15 of cancer at his New York home. He was 82.

Nirenberg, who in 1968 was the first federal employee to win a Nobel in physiology or medicine, was “one of science’s great titans,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, Nirenberg joined the mad dash by scientists to build on the work of James Watson and Francis Crick, among others, who discovered the double-helix shape of DNA.

Working day and night, Nirenberg and his assistant, Heinrich Matthaei, discovered how RNA transmits the messages that are encoded in DNA and directs how amino acids combine to make proteins. They had found the first of 64 three-letter “words” in which the instructions of life are written.

“I literally jumped for joy,” he said in 2005. “It’s fun to discover things, and it’s important to discover things.”

In the summer of 1961, he presented his findings at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow. But his talk was nearly ignored because “he was not a member of the club,” wrote Horace Freeland Judson in “The Eighth Day of Creation” (1979). Luckily, one of the scientists who heard his initial talk convinced the conference leaders to invite Nirenberg to repeat his performance. Speaking before an assembly of more than 1,000 people, Nirenberg electrified the crowd.

Once his technique was announced, Nirenberg still had an enormous amount of work to do. He had identified a few of the code words, but there were dozens to go. Bigger, better-equipped research labs were at work on the same problem, while Nirenberg and Matthaei were working alone.

“Faced with the possibility of helping the first NIH scientist win a Nobel prize, many NIH scientists put aside their own work to help Nirenberg,” the NIH said in a history of its role in deciphering the code. “All in all, more than 20 people came through Nirenberg’s laboratory.”

By 1965, Nirenberg, with help from those colleagues, created what is essentially biology’s Rosetta stone: a 64-square table that shows the relationship between DNA and proteins.

“We found that all species … use the same language, molecular language,” he said in 2005. “We compared the code in bacteria to the language used in an amphibian, to a mammal and found that it’s the same language.”

He shared the Nobel with Har Gobind Khorana of the University of Wisconsin, who mastered the synthesis of nucleic acids, and Robert Holley of the Salk Institute, who discovered the exact chemical structure of transfer-RNA.

Nirenberg spent his career at NIH where colleagues described him as enthusiastic about the work of others and highly collegial. Researchers who worked under him became scientific leaders in labs around the world, including two who earned their own Nobel Prizes.

Rev. E. Schillebeeckx, Catholic theologian

The Rev. Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent member of a wave of Roman Catholic theologians who helped reshape Catholicism during the Second Vatican Council and whose writings were later investigated for heresy, died Dec. 23 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He was 95.

He died after a short illness, according to the Edward Schillebeeckx Foundation in Nijmegen, which preserves his work.

Born and raised in Belgium, he entered the Dominican religious order and joined the theological faculty at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University) in 1958. He soon became a leading adviser to the Dutch bishops, especially during the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, a protracted reassessment of Catholic life held in Rome from 1962 to 1965.

There he entered into discussions of the council’s documents, which eventually allowed celebration of the Mass in modern languages rather than only in Latin, endorsed religious freedom, removed many barriers between Catholics, Protestants and other faiths and promoted a positive engagement with contemporary culture.

After the council, Schillebeeckx continued pressing for the kind of changes it had initiated.

He lectured widely on matters like the nature of revelation and argued for democratic procedures in church governance and the ordination of married people, both men and women, to the priesthood.

He helped prepare the “New Dutch Catechism,” which the Dutch bishops published in 1966 and which sold widely.

From 1968 to 1981, the Vatican began three investigations of his writings for heresy.

They all ended inconclusively with admonitions, complaints and requests for clarification but with no formal censures or penalties.

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